Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Warner Brothers
EAN: 0794043749728
Format: AC-3
Label: New Line Home Video
Manufacturer: New Line Home Video
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: New Line Home Video
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2005-02-08
Running Time: 124
Studio: New Line Home Video
Theatrical Release Date: 2004-06-25

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Spotlight customer reviews:

Customer Rating:

Summary: Best love story !!
Comment: I love this movie.....The story is so touching and realistic !! Love James Garner and Gena Rowlands. This is the type of movie that you can watch again and again, especially on a rainy Sunday. I would highy recommend this to anyone who enjoys a good story with great acting....I really enjoyed the flashback scenes and watching the story unfold. Get yourself a copy and enjoy !! PS.Keep a box of tissues near by.....

Customer Rating:

Summary: notebook
Comment: This is an excellent film, even for a guy to watch, tell me what James Garner film isn't. I purchased this as a gift for my grandmother and she really enjoyed it as did I. I would like to add I had problem getting this order - NO it was not Amazons fault, at least I don't believe so; but Amazon took responsibility and sent me a whole other order, without cost to me, and even paid for an upgrade in the shipping for the whole order which included the classic Wizard Of Oz.

Customer Rating:

Summary: The Notebook was such a touchy-feely Movie that it made a Man out of liberal, old me since I lost my Virginity while viewing it!
Comment: The stereotypical tearjerker-fest, The Notebook, is infamous for appealing mostly to women--because their gender is one that's characterized by emotionality, nurturing, negotiating and verbalizing (ok...and, yes, wild mood swings)--while being avoided by men. Due to our society's gender stereotypes, sensitive men who want to get in touch with their proverbial, "feminine" side by watching The Notebook will inevitably be derided as "g*y," "h*mo," "que*r"...you get the point.

Well, that's where I put MY foot down!!!! See, I don't give a damn if the whole world knows I'm a man--NOT G*Y, though (not that there's anything wrooooong with that, wink, wink!) who enjoys The Notebook!!!! I don't care if the whole world knows that I'm suffering through a mid-life crisis; am "whipped" by my wife in a one-sided marriage-of-convenience; stay at home watching the kids as a stay-at-home-dad while my wife brings home the bacon; or cry during and after extremely brutal and domineering sex with my wife (her nickname is "ballbuster"). I am a man (hear me roar; no, more like meow and purr) who just happens to really enjoy the emasculated-man's movie, The Notebook...to where I'm actively psychologically dependent on said movie just to get by every day of my life.

See, I'm the kind of man who's the leftover relic of the stereotypical, "sensitive," 90s-type man...except I'm now living in the 21st century. As such, I purposefully gravitate towards proverbial "chick flicks," films which will get me murderously derided as a "h*mo," "que*r," etc., just because I'm intentionally trying to get in touch with my feminine side (and my wife who whips the hell out of me has threatened to withhold sex AGAIN and berate me in public if I don't comply!).

So, it follows that The Notebook was the no-brainer choice for me to get in touch with my feminine side; you know, the side that's more nurturing, intellectual, loving...and also bossy, irrational, and oftentimes just plain bitchy (and definitely no good with managing money). Anywho, what attracted me instantly to The Notebook were the leads: Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (both Canadians, which immediately lowered my respect for the casting director). Especially Gosling, who, when he removes his shirt in the film (4 times; I know; I counted), has that desirable, lean-muscular look that you could just picture yourself ******! Ahem, just disregard that last thought...I really wanted to write that McAdams is very hot. Very, very hot indeed. Yes, I'm a heterosexual man and I find women "hot." Yes, that's what I really meant.

I was monstrously confused by the abrupt and awkward flashback sequences of The Notebook; that's how it tells its story: James Garner and Gena Rowlands are the contemporary Noah and Allie, who are now old and near-death. The flashbacks tell the story of their meeting and sometimes torrid courtship and relationship while Garner and Rowlands are Noah and Allie in the present, one beset with Alzheimer's and the other having a bad heart.

The first flashback tells of Noah and Allie's first encounter. He pursues her at a carnival--which is so alien to me since as a guy in touch with his feminine side, my wife actually courted me--and actually does some ext*rtion to force her to go out with him (he hangs on a pole when the ferris wheel's stopped and threatens to let go). This leads to Noah and his friend bumping into Allie and her friend at the movies like THAT'S never happened before in a romantic movie! Noah and Allie get some alone time via going for a walk when it's revealed that their respective friends are horn dogs, who continuously stick their tongues down each other's throats at the movies (first, this lascivious showing of lust bothered me, but then I realized I was a moral relativist, so I was fine with it!). Their walk ends up deteriorating in a barbaric clich of boy-meets-girl predictability: they confide in each other, and he "philosophically" asks her why she never does anything for herself! This sappiness and insipidness would've already rightly driven away any real, heterosexual man, but I'm proud to say that in-touch-with-his-feminine-side me had the estrogen-loving willpower to still sit through it!!!!

The flashback continues in a scene which has Noah luring Allie to an old, abandoned house he only claims he wants to fix up for her. Riiiiiight, we guys know what's really on Noah's mind in this case...he wants to cook her dinner, wind and dine her, and then NOT expect her to put out! Uhhhhhh, at least that's what my first date with my wife was like. Anywho, this abandoned-house setting brings forth the first, real untrustworthy part of the movie that even had a moral relativist like me discomforted.

Keeping in mind that this film is rated PG-13, I nearly had a momentary pang of conscience when I next saw that Allie was slavishly begging Noah to shag her. What made it worse was that due to the film's misleading rating, I had ALL of my children gathered on the floor in front of the TV and around my La-Z-Boy recliner about to have their innocent, delicate eyes and minds exposed to potentially lurid, Hollywood-style glorification of p*rn!!!! However, I soon threw moral decision-making out the window when I realized that my kids--Ali Baba, Hassan, Benazeer, Ibn Al Ryad Bin Fazoul, Achmed and Butch (Butch is actually my adopted son; all the rest are from my first marriage when I forcefully had them convert to Islam)--would probably be having profane sex soon anyway, seeing as how they're all enrolled in the Maine school system, where birth control's available for 11-year-olds.

So letting my kids watch the sex scene, I disappointingly discovered that it was merely the kind which frustratingly insinuates sex via the facial expressions and groans of the exemplary actors (kind of like the "lovemaking" in my marriage) instead of being full-on p*rn. Oh, well.

At this juncture Noah and Allie are separated by his feelings of resentful inadequacy at Allie's parents' (they're well-to-do, you know) derision of him. He fights in WW2 (I hated this patriotic, pro-American tangent of the character in the film; this ALMOST ruined what could've been the perfect, sappy vehicle to put me in touch with my feminine side permanently) and so breaks off contact with Allie for seven years. Bizarrely, though, the conclusion of the war finds him right back in the same town where--gasp!--Allie still resides also, probably due to the writers' abysmal shortcoming at understanding proper believability in film! In the meantime, Allie's been shacking up with an equally well-to-do man who also served in WW2 (two pro-war characters in one movie?! I almost wanted to shout, "F*** that!"), but soon stabs him in the back to fraternize with Noah (we all know the best romances are the ones where cheating on lovers is involved).

At this point in The Notebook, even old moral relativist me had a bit of a crisis of conscience in evaluating whether to allow my six kids to see this imminent sex scene, which turned out to be the more graphic of the two. When Allie makes an excuse to ditch her current fiancee, she gets together with Noah in Seabrook, where he takes her out rowing on a lake. Conveniently, it starts to rain as they come in from the lake, and this, naturally, would make any two people want to have relations (I mean, sex, of course). Though I finally had moral reservations about my kids seeing this sex scene--I actually let them view it because, as I wrote earlier, my kids go to school in Maine, so it won't be long before they're doing stuff like this--I began to appreciate the stark, naked beauty of this sex scene. It was so beautiful that I ended up spooning with myself (because my wife was at work) and crying like my wife just had her way with me in bed.

The sex scene was so beautiful and glorious (not obscene like those you see in Yale University's 2008 Sex Week!): when the rain came down, Noah clumsily grabbed Allie's face and pulled her face onto his despite the fact he made bad coordination and actually started kissing her eye. This occurs out in the fields, yet it's really surprising to see the couple still kissing in their clumsy way after the 500 or so yards it takes to reach the front door of his house--keep in mind they had to awkwardly keep kissing while making their way through the rain to the porch!

Here's where the sex scene really heats up in all its simulated, fabricated "passion." Inside the entryway, Noah coldly manhandles Allie and roughly shoves her against the wall (at this juncture, I was slobbering in anticipation of "rough sex"), still emotionlessly simulating all the way. Next, Allie, the repressed vixen she is, hungrily strips off her man Noah's slacks to the point where her face actually is level with his crotch for a bit; the beauty of this glorious scene of selfish lust was such a human moment in this film, let me tell you. My loins were further massaged when Noah then pulled off an article of clothing off of Allie (who cares what it was at this point) and also hoisted her up with her legs wrapped around his pelvis. At this point of serene, though fake, lovemaking, my feminine side was being nurtured so much that it was almost in reach, and I thought I was climaxing. The sheer beauty of this simulated lovemaking was further enriched when Noah proceeded to carry Allie all the way through the long hallway, up several flights of stairs and then finally into an upstairs bedroom instead of ravishing her right there on the hallway floor like a heterosexual man would. Obviously, the very sensitive writers knew that real men unnaturally delay their sexual impulses until they can ceremoniously carry their women through the length of the entire house. The sex scene wrapped up in the epitome of further beauty: both actors showing their Oscar-caliber acting by screwing up their faces in grimaces of, I guess, passion while making grunting sounds. This was the filmmakers' representation of the ideal scene of beautiful lovemaking, and as the sensitive man, I do agree.

At this point in the flashback, Noah gives Allie an ultimatum: to decide between him or her current, well-to-do boyfriend. Forwarding to the present again, the film shows Garner and Rowlands discussing this story up to this point. Keep in mind that the Rowlands character has Alzheimers and so cannot remember that Noah and Allie are in fact the present-day Garner and Rowlands. However, at this point in the film, a miracle occurs and Rowlands suddenly remembers everything! Woefully, though, this moment of fake peace is immediately ruined when Rowlands starts to go crazy and suddenly doesn't remember who Garner, as the older Noah, now is. Nurses then rush in and medicate Rowlands (about time, too!) while Garner starts crying and not about his Medicare benefits program being too hard to understand.

The movie concludes in a rather callous way when a stealthy James Garner creeps into a medicated Gena Rowlands bed, and the two of them die together overnight; a nurse then discovers the stiffs in the morning. I conjecture that the writers assumed this would be a touching moment on which to end the film, but I found it a bit creepy. Still, the movie achieved its mission by putting me completely in touch with my feminine side and allowing my wife to "whip" me even harder in my marriage now. And this is how The Notebook ended up making a liberal man out of me.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Unforgettable
Comment: I'm very picky about my movies. A good movie must have good casting, a good story, good cinematography, and realistic dialog that plays out on the screen in either a realistic or fanstasmic manner. Rarely do I find a film that fits this category, and it is improbable that I would find a chick-flick that fits my standards. Recently, I had a couple of girls share with me a movie called The Notebook, based on Nicholas Spark's romantic novel of the same title. As a man, I initially found the idea of watching a chick-flick repulsive and disgusting, and were it not that I was friends with them, I would have simply ignored their request and loaded up my favorite musical, Sweeney Todd or a nice healthy dose of violence, like 300.

I'm glad I didn't.

After watching this one-and-a-half hour movie, I can honestly tell you that it is one of the best films I have ever seen. The Notebook is not only a chick-flick, but the perfect date movie (take this down, gents). This honestly is the movie I want to curl up on the couch with my future girlfriend with (whoever she may be) and watch in each other's arms. As much as it should shame me to admit it, I had tears well up at the ending, which was perfectly executed by the movie's talented cast and director. It's a story about a young, innocent summer love between a rich girl and a poor boy, and unlike most shallow chick-flicks, it's a story about an aging husband who is devoted to his wife even when she has dementia and cannot remember their love.

What would I rate this movie as?

A+

Customer Rating:

Summary: simply one of the best movies i have ever seen
Comment: Ok, I will write this review despite the fact that probably noone will read it. This is my all time favorite movie. Why? Because it never gets boring to watch. Yes I am a chick. Yes, this is a chick movie. But, guys like it too, even though they won't admit it. My very manly husband has watched this with me 2x, and CRIED both times. Don't let that scare you off, especially the guys. It is absolutely one of the best love stories ever ever ever put to film. Never cheesy, despite other reviews. It tells the story of two young adults finding love for perhaps the first time. If that isn't universal, I don't know what is. The satisfaction of seeing them finally end up together is so gratifying. The kiss in the rain (as shown on the cover of the movie) is worth watching all by itself. Yes I am a hopeless romantic. Deep down, who isn't? EVERYONE should see this movie. Then you will know why it is so beloved. If i could give it 10 stars I would.

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Editorial Reviews:
Behind every great love is a great story. Two teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks fall in love during one summer together but are tragically forced apart. When they reunite 7 years later their passionate romance is rekindled forcing one of them to choose between true love and class order.Running Time: 124 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 794043749728